The NoDerivatives part is concerning. Is he trying to prevent forks?
Regardless as the maintainer of that GitHub clarified in a closed pull request, it’s not actually allowed on Github to have a license that blocks the ability to do forks and modify the programs yourself, I never knew this but it says it on the page he linked.
basically it seems if you post a project as public on Github, you implicitly grant a license to fork and use the code regardless of what it’s terms say since you need to follow those terms for the Github platform usage. The section 6 I’m not sure about though, cause the terminology confuses me, I can’t tell if it means that it can be supercedes or that it supercedes a private license
it seems his intent isn’t to dissuade people contributing, he’s just been burned a few times with GPL violations so he’s changing the terms to prevent that
Forks of versions before the license was changed would still be okay, no?
This should be correct yes, as long as you don’t include code that was added after the license change you should be in Clearwater.
Technically speaking I don’t think it’s allowed for him to have changed the license to a more restrictive license in the first place because he didn’t rewrite the entire project when he did so which means it’s still containing code that under the license terms are supposed to be open indefinitely, but if you want to avoid all that drama you can just play it safe and Fork the version prior to him editing the license
Personally speaking now this isn’t going to stop the people that he’s trying to avoid that hassle with, because I don’t think he has legal ground because I don’t think the license change was within the allowed terms of his license in the first place
If what he did is illegal, what is anyone going to do about it though? Two people with no money are going to sue each other? Perhaps maybe a law firm would want to get involved, but I can’t see how this even gets enforced other than everyone forking to code anyway and completely ignoring the new terms since they wouldn’t apply.